Well I can safely say that I have put enough time into this demo, as it’s less than 10 minutes long.

In Alliance Peacefighter I was given a ship, a bunch of cute alien talking heads telling me what’s up and interacting with one another, and then it was off to the races.

It took me longer to set up my HOSAS to work with this game than it did to finish the game. It’s a very basic space dogfighting demo. I had lasers and missiles, could target various enemies, target sub-systems, match speed, route power between engines, weapons, and shields, and launch counter-measures. That’s really all there was to the demo.

At the end I was told I had to dock with a carrier, and I did this by flying through some rings until the tractor beam took over.

I’m not going to lie and say that this was a great experience, but it wasn’t terrible. The worst part about it was that there didn’t seem to be a “zero position” for my throttle; I was either moving forward or moving in reverse and I couldn’t take my hands off the stick lest I back my ass up into an asteroid at full speed or something. The action was a bit too frantic to keep an eye on my dashboard, so while I opted to put some additional oomph into my weapons, I didn’t mess around with shield distribution because I never seemed really in any danger of exploding.

The aliens are kind of cute in a “this is the best we could do” kind of way (or, if it’s an actual choice, kudos), so I’m glad the developers owned their designs. I have no issues with them, and kinda like the aesthetic they’re going for here.

I’m interested to see what other gameplay, if any, there is here. If it’s just a “jump in a shoot ships” game, then it would be a hard pass for me; as it stands, the throttle issue knocked it off my wishlist, but I’ll keep an eye on it and see what happens with it over time, and maybe it could be a cool, easy to launch space combat game I’d enjoy.